Monday, November 26, 2018

Starting this week, Ohio businesses will have a new way to pay their taxes: Bitcoin. The Wall Street Journal reports (via TechCrunch) that the state of Ohio has opened a cryptocurrency portal, ohiocrypto.com, which will allow businesses to pay with the digital currency.

The WSJ says that Ohio appears to be the first state to allow people to pay with a cryptocurrency, and that the idea originated with State Treasurer Josh Mandel. The site’s FAQ cites the state’s track record with innovation and says that paying via Bitcoin is instantaneous, secure, and transparent. It also lists 23 different taxes that businesses can pay with Bitcoin, ranging from cigarette and tobacco taxes to fuel and sales taxes.

A month after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, developer Rockstar has announced that the game’s online mode will start rolling out this week. The beta for Red Dead Online will actually be available for some users.

As for what you’ll actually be doing in Red Dead Online, there’s still a lot we don’t know. Here’s how Rockstar explains it:

With the gameplay of Red Dead Redemption 2 as its foundation, Red Dead Online transforms the vast and deeply detailed landscapes, cities, towns, and habitats of Red Dead Redemption 2 into a new, living online world ready to be shared by multiple players. Create and customize your character, tailor your abilities to suit your play style, and head out into a new frontier full of things to experience.

Explore this huge world solo or with friends. Form or join a posse to ride with up to seven players; gather around the fire at your camp; head out hunting or fishing; visit bustling towns; battle enemy gangs and attack their hideouts; hunt for treasure; take on missions and interact with familiar characters from across the five states; or fight against other outlaws in both spontaneous skirmishes and pitched set-piece battles; compete with other players or whole posses in open world challenges and much more.

Bitcoin is in the middle of price drop, reaching prices as low as $3,520 in recent days and wiping out all gains from coins purchased this year. As of press time, the price was hovering around $3,900, a roughly 40 percent drop from two weeks ago. The result is the worst price drop since April 2013, refreshing old doubts about the soundness of bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

It’s a dramatic turn from 2017, when the value passed $15,000 in the beginning of December to peak just below $20,000. After that, prices plummeted. By January of this year, it lost half of its peak value, and continued to drop. The drop has been particularly dramatic in the last couple of weeks.

The price drop is likely the result of a series of forks this year, which produced parallel currencies like Bitcoin Cash. A planned fork of Bitcoin Cash took place on November 15th, and was accompanied by considerable angst from traders ahead of time. CoinDesk notes that Bitcoin Cash and several other bitcoin forks have reported losses of more than 10 percent in a 24 hour period.

Microsoft has overtaken Apple in market cap value for the first time in eight years. Microsoft briefly reached a market cap value of $812.93 billion today, followed by Apple at a market cap of $812.60 billion. It made Microsoft the world’s most valuable company, even if it was only a temporary title. Microsoft and Apple are now trading back and forth for the title.

Apple first passed Microsoft back in 2010, with The New York Times describing the moment as “the end of an era and the beginning of the next one.” While Apple’s stock has seen phenomenal growth over the past five years, culminating in a $1 trillion valuation earlier this year, investors are concerned about iPhone sales which still make up nearly 60 percent of Apple’s entire revenue. Apple has warned it may miss Wall Street estimates during the holiday quarter, and the forecast sent the stock price down. Recent reports suggest Apple has resumed iPhone X production due to weak XS sales. Apple will no longer reveal how many iPhones, iPads, and Macs it sells, making it harder for analysts to calculate exactly how well iPhone sales are going in the future.

MICROSOFT STOCK HAS BEEN PERFORMING WELL UNDER NADELLA
Microsoft’s stock has also been performing well in recent years, helped by a boost in confidence from the company appointing Satya Nadella as CEO in February 2014. Nadella has refocused Microsoft on the cloud, and the software giant has made big gains against Amazon, its primary rival. Microsoft passed Google earlier this year in market cap value, and also passed Amazon last month. Microsoft has a surprisingly diverse business compared to other tech giants. Windows, Xbox, and Surface combined makes up just 36 percent of Microsoft’s entire revenue, compared to 86 percent of Google’s revenue coming from ads.

Friday, November 23, 2018

Amazon warehouse workers in several countries in Europe are protesting over what they claim are inhuman working conditions which treat people like robots. It’s the latest in a series of worker actions this year.

They’ve timed the latest protest for Black Friday, one of the busiest annual shopping days online as retailers slash prices and heavily promote deals to try to spark a seasonal buying rush.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it would stop blocking Australians from shopping on its U.S. site after a customer backlash, unwinding a move which has tarnished the e-commerce giant’s launch in the world’s 12th-largest economy.

The reversal relieved shoppers who had complained since July about being locked out of the much larger range of offerings they had grown accustomed to on the U.S. site following the opening of Amazon’s local platform a year ago.But it also raised questions about why Amazon had cited Australian tax laws to explain the initial block - an issue rival eBay Inc (EBAY.O) had managed to resolve without locking Australians out of its U.S. site.The world’s second-largest company had prevented Australians from placing any orders on its U.S. website after Australia applied a 10 percent tax on imported online goods worth less than A$1,000 (£568).At least 32 U.S. states have passed or are soon expected to pass similar taxes, but Australia had been the first market where Amazon responded by shutting out customers based on where they lived.On the eve of its Black Friday sales, Amazon said it had figured a way to levy the tax without blocking access to the U.S. site.EBay, which also does not disclose its Australian sales, said it found the transition complex but was able to collect and remit taxes without changes for customers.

The next tournament will be the Winter Royale, which will be hosted through Fortnite’s in-game tournament system.

The Winter Royale will consist of two different stages, the qualifiers and the Finals, and will be a solo event meaning every player will be competing on their own. Just like previous in-game tournaments, the Winter Royale qualifiers will throw players into lobbies with other players competing in the tournament, and grant points for things like high finishes and eliminations.

The players who have the highest points at the end of the qualifiers will then have a chance to compete in the Finals for a part of the tournament’s $1 million prize pool.

Teens used to try alcohol first, then tobacco, and then marijuana. Now, marijuana is increasingly the first “gateway” substance for adolescents, according to new research.

This trend is not because teens are smoking cannabis more than ever. Rather, the change is because teens are smoking cigarettes and drinking less while the numbers for marijuana have held steady, according to Katherine M. Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and co-author of the new study, published this week in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

“As we’ve seen the dramatic declines in alcohol and tobacco, we haven’t seen dramatic declines in marijuana, so now every year it’s more and more likely that kids are starting their drug-use careers with marijuana,” says Keyes. She adds that rates of teen drinking and smoking started to fall — thanks largely to widespread public health campaigns — long before the recent wave of pro-marijuana lobbying.

The authors found this by analyzing 40 years of surveys from American high school seniors. For example, in 1995, three-fourths of seniors who used both marijuana and cigarettes had tried cigarettes first. By 2016, only 40 percent had tried cigarettes first. Today, less than half of teens try alcohol and cigarettes before trying cannabis. (The researchers didn’t look specifically at whether alcohol or tobacco came next.) Other studies have found that, in general, teens are doing fewer drugs than ever, except for marijuana.

Most likely, this trend will continue as marijuana becomes less stigmatized and more and more states vote to legalize the drug. Though teens aren’t supposed to smoke marijuana even in the states that have fully legalized it, “it’s not going out on a huge limb to suggest that marijuana is going to be more available at a lower cost to adolescents,” says Keyes. “If you make a substance more available at a lower cost and easier to access, you’re gonna see increases.” After all, it’s also illegal for kids to drink or smoke, but many easily find both alcohol and cigarettes in their own homes.

One important caveat is that the tobacco information only refers to traditional combustible cigarettes and doesn’t take into account the spike in underage vaping (though vaping alone doesn’t account for the lower levels of smoking). “If anything, what this paper shows is that gateway sequences are malleable and very context-specific,” says Keyes. “When you think about substance use in adolescents, you kind of have to keep your eye on the whole picture and not do it substance by substance. The next product that comes onto the scene and delivers nicotine in a way young people like could create a different sequence.”

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Google has released a minor update to their Dart programming language, version 2.1, focused on improving its overall performance. These improvements have been promised to reach Flutter for its upcoming 1.0 release.

Dart, one of a few programming languages developed by Google, was originally conceived as an alternative language for web developers to compete with JavaScript. While that plan didn’t exactly succeed, Dart has found new life thanks to Flutter, Google’s new cross-platform app development framework, which is still in the “release preview” stage.

In August, Dart landed its major 2.0 update, which brought a whole host of improvements to the language, many of which were designed around accommodating Flutter and its users. Now Dart version 2.1 has hit release, showing further support for Flutter without leaving behind its web development roots.

A new Google data center will be built in Denmark at a cost of almost $700M. The company first said that it wanted to have the option of doing so exactly a year ago.

Google got as far as purchasing land right next door to one of Apple’s two data centers in the country. Although this one is in a different location, Google likely chose Denmark for the same three reasons

Google’s AI call screening feature, which came with the Pixel 3 at launch and is now rolling out to older Pixel phones, will soon get transcription support. The feature, which allows Google Assistant to pick up suspected spam calls before letting users decide if they want to answer, will be able to save transcriptions of phone calls later this year.

Currently, when Google Assistant picks up a spam call, users can only watch transcriptions in real time as the conversation is happening. Once the call is over, there’s no way for a user to revisit the conversation. A Call Screen product manager on Google’s support forumsconfirmed last week that the feature will be launching later this year, and transcripts will be automatically saved in the Call Log once the call has ended, in the Call Details section. Public beta testers of the Google Phone app can access the feature first, otherwise, the feature will be rolling out to Pixel 3 users at the end of this year.

The call screen feature is rolling out now to Pixel 2 and 2 XL phones, as well as the rest of the Pixel family. Once it hits your phone, you don’t need to do anything to enable the feature. Just sit back and enjoy watching robots talk to robots.

Coupang, Korea’s largest e-commerce firm, revealed today that it has raised $2 billion from the Vision Fund. The investment is SoftBank’s largest since Khashoggi’s murder in October and it comes weeks after SoftBank’s existing stake in Coupang was transferred over the Vision Fund, as the firm has done with a number of its investments.

PlayVS, the company bringing esports infrastructure to high schools across the country, has today announced the close of a $30.5 million Series B financing. The round was led by Elysian Park Ventures, the investment arm of the L.A. Dodgers, with participation from five existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Science Inc., Crosscut Ventures, Coatue Management and WndrCo.

New investors also joined in on the round, including Adidas (the company’s first esports investment), Samsung NEXT, Plexo Capital, as well as angel investors such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, David Drummond, DST Global partner Rahul Mehta, Michael Dubin and others.

3 months after Facebook announced its “Your Time On Facebook” tool that counts how many minutes you spend on the app, the feature is finally rolling out around the world. Designed to help you manage your social networking, the dashboard reveals how many minutes you’ve spent on Facebook’s app on that device each day for the past week and on average.

You can set a daily limit and receive a reminder to stop after that many minutes each day, plus access shortcuts to notification ,News Feed, and Friend Request settings. Those last two shortcuts are new, but otherwise the feature works the same as when it was previewed. You can access it by going to Facebook’s More tab -> Settings & Privacy -> Your Time On Facebook

SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), a fully reusable vehicle designed to take humans and supplies to Mars and also to dramatically cut travel time within Earth, is getting a new name, Starship, the company’s CEO Elon Musk has announced.This two-stage vehicle — composed of a Booster and a Ship — is designed to eventually replace the company’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and the Dragon spacecraft.

It is designed to service all Earth orbit needs as well as the Moon and Mars.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Back in September, Microsoft announced a virtual desktop solution that lets customers run Office 365 and Windows 10 in the cloud. They mentioned several partners in the announcement that were working on solutions with them. One of those was FSLogix, a Georgia virtual desktop startup. Today, Microsoft announced it has acquired FSLogix. It did not share the purchase price.Microsoft believes by incorporating the FSLogix solution, it will provide a better virtual desktop experience for its customers by enabling better performance and faster load times, especially for Office 365 ProPlus customers.Randy Cook, founder and CTO at FSLogix, said the acquisition made sense given how well the two companies have worked together over the years. “From the beginning, in working closely with several teams at Microsoft, we recognized that our missions were completely aligned. Both FSLogix and Microsoft are dedicated to providing the absolute best experience for companies choosing to deploy virtual desktops,” Cook wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

Crypto exchange Binance has been moving bitcoin funds to cold storage the past couple of days, and, of course, such large transfers don’t go unnoticed.

Two transactions destined for Binance’s cold wallet come to the fore and demonstrate both the power and irony of the blockchain. A transaction in block 550211 was a transfer of just over $1 million. For this transaction, Binance paid just over $8 in fees. The “high” amount of the fee is probably a matter of convenience, as the transaction was not particularly large at just 1550 bytes.

The other transaction, first flagged by Antoine Le Calvez of CoinMetrics.io, is more notable for its size — $600 million at the time it was sent, making it the largest unspent transaction output existing today — but also illustrates the irony of Bitcoin transactions, whose fees are not based on the amount transacted but instead the amount of computer resources required to store the information. This second transaction, made in block 550155 several hours earlier, comprised 5981 bytes yet cost the giant exchange just over $7.

A cold storage wallet is one that is not connected to the blockchain via the internet. With appropriate security hygiene, it can amount to having direct access to your personal fortune with no middlemen. similar transaction hypothetically in Paypal would have costed atleast $17 million dollars

Tencent Games has announced a collaboration with SLIVER.tv, a blockchain esports entertainment platform to create a 24/7 live esports channel that will feature streamers from FaZe Clan, Method, and NRG, in addition to interactive functionality such as prediction games, trivia, and prizes for viewers. Making the announcement on November 19, the game development behemoth, which is behind the popular Ring of Elysium battle royale game, revealed that the channel would be powered by Theta rewards, and users would be able to purchase in-game items and upgrades using Theta tokens.Speaking about the partnership, Mitch Liu, co-founder and CEO of SLIVER.tv and Theta Labs said:“Our partnership with Tencent Games will help us continue to drive interactive esports by featuring exciting content from Ring of Elysium. Combined with our unique Theta rewards and blockchain technology, users become part of the esports experience, driving greater engagement and retention for our partners and games.”

Google may shut down its Google News service in the European Union (EU) if a proposed “link tax” for using news stories comes into force in member countries, The Guardian reported.

According to the new copyright directive, adopted by the European Parliament on September 12, tech giants must pay for work of artists and journalists which they use.

To put the rule changes into effect, individual member countries would have to draft local laws.

Google is deeply concerned about the current proposals, which are designed to compensate struggling news publishers if snippets of their articles appear in search results, Richard Gingras, the search engine’s Vice President of News told the Guardian.

The future of Google News could depend on whether the EU was willing to alter the phrasing of the legislation, he said.

“We can’t make a decision until we see the final language,” he was quoted as saying.

This is not the first time an attempt is being made to charge Google for links. In 2014, Spain passed a law requiring aggregation sites to pay for news links.

Google then decided to close down the service for Spanish consumers.

Traditional media outlets tend to blame Google for sucking up much of the advertising revenue which used to prop up print newspapers, the Guardian reported.

But many news websites also depend on the service to drive traffic to their websites.

Google News is not directly a profit-making business for the company, while it does encourage users to spend more time on the company’s websites, Gingras said, adding that the search giant does not put any advertising in Google News.

Microsoft’s cloud-based multi-factor authentication services went down across the globe early Monday morning, preventing access to users who are required to sign in using a second layer of authentication to their account, such as a text message, a push notification on their phone, or a hardware key. As user comes to password page nothing happens.

Mumbai-based payments gateway BillDesk has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from global payments technology company Visa to develop new product lines for its payments and loyalty businesses and also expand its footprint into other geographies.

In a media statement, Visa noted that the investment is not expected to have any direct bearing on its existing Indian business.

The development comes after reports of June 2018, which said that Visa may lead a fresh funding round of $250 Mn for BillDesk, at a valuation of $1.5-2 Bn.

Season 4 will hit Android and iOS, and that too, without the servers going offline. An update will be rolled out later tonight and early tomorrow morning with the new Ranked season as well as the Royale Pass.

We’ve already received the in-game notification regarding the arrival of Season 4 on the game’s iOS and Android version, complete with all the new items and changes that come alongside. But make sure that you are running the latest version of PUBG to enter the action in Season 4.

Among the new changes that will go live tomorrow are the addition of dynamic weather in the Sanhok map as well as a new vehicle in the form of a scooter. Other key additions are the arrival of ‘hardcore’ mode which is claimed to provide the same thrilling experience on mobile as one gets on a PC.

As is customary with the start of a new season, a brand new weapon also marks its arrival. The new weapon that will be available starting tomorrow is the M762 assault rifle which has multiple firing modes and can deal some heavy damage. But unlike a few other weapons that came with new seasons, the M762 assault rifle will be available in all maps.

As for the Season 4 Royale Pass, here’s what it brings to the table:

Additional customization options such as new character faces, hairstyles, and rare outfits

More firearm finishes

Improvements to the redemption feature

New Mission cards

A new event has been introduced in which item packs will receive hefty discounts during Black Friday

Hackers have been stealing CPU-cycles from visitors to the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s international website since March in order to mine for Monero cryptocurrency. Researchers said they found the CoinIMP mining script embedded in the non-profit’s website, and that it was taking advantage of the Drupalgeddon 2 vulnerability.

Trustwave researchers discovered the cryptominer on the Make-A-Wish International’s websiteand said it had been active since mid-October. Make-A-Wish International is the global arm of the US-based Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The CoinIMP miner is JavaScript based and is often used by unsavory individuals who secretly embed the code into websites and use it to mine Monero currency on a site visitor’s phone, tablet or computer

A flaw in the Android mobile operating system could allow an attacker with physical proximity to a WiFi router to track the location of users within the router’s range.

The issue (CVE-2018-9581) allows information leakage stemming from inter-process communication. While applications on Android are usually segregated by the OS from each other and from the OS itself, there are still mechanisms for sharing information between them when needed. One of those mechanisms is the use of what Android calls “intents.”

An application or the OS itself can send an “intent” message out, which is broadcast system-wide and can be listened to by other applications. Without proper access restrictions and permissions put in place around these intents, it’s possible for malicious applications to intercept information that it shouldn’t have access to.

All versions of Android are believed to be affected (although on Android 9 one of the two broadcast types is no longer revealing sensitive data, as part of the fix for a related bug, CVE-2018-9489).

The Crimes of Grindelwald grossed $253.2 million (about Rs. 1,824 crores) at the worldwide box office over the weekend and in doing so, took the Harry Potter spin-off franchise total over a billion dollars. Its 2016 predecessor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, had earned $814 million globally during its theatrical run.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald box office collection
Of that $253.2 million total, The Crimes of Grindelwald picked up $62.2 million (about Rs. 448 crores) in the US, with the rest $191 million (about Rs. 1,375.67 crores) coming from international markets. The latter figure is higher than what the original did back in 2016, at $186 million. The sequel had the best opening of any Wizarding World film in 18 countries, including Russia ($12.1 million), Brazil ($6.9 million), Argentina, and Indonesia.

Xiaomi's Black Shark global website went live last month, hinting at an imminent launch outside of China. A recent report also hinted that the gaming smartphone will launch in Europe on November 16, and finally the smartphone has gone on sale in the region. The Black Shark global website has now listed the gaming phone for sale in Europe in varied colours and RAM + storage options.

Starting with the Xiaomi Black Shark, the gaming phone is listed in Black and Grey colour options in 6GB RAM + 64GB storage and 8GB RAM + 128GB storage options. Xiaomi is offering an EUR 30 (roughly Rs. 2,400) discount as part of the introductory launch offer, and is making the 6GB RAM variant available for EUR 469 (roughly Rs. 38,300), and the 8GB RAM variant is listed with the discounted price of EUR 519 (roughly Rs. 42,400).

e Black Shark gaming phone was launched in China in April this year, and its price starts at CNY 2,999 (roughly Rs. 31,100) and goes up to CNY 3,499 (roughly Rs. 36,300). Some of the specifications include Snapdragon 845 SoC, Adreno 630 GPU, 6GB and 8GB RAM models, dual-rear camera setup with a 20-megapixel sensor and a 12-megapixel sensor, 20-megapixel selfie camera, 64GB and 128GB inbuilt storage variants, and more. Xiaomi has also introduced the Black Shark Helo smartphone in China recently, and global availability of this device still remains a mystery.

Microsoft Outlook has a built-in email scheduler but you do not have a ‘native’ option to delay the delivery of email messages inside Gmail or Google Inbox. That’s where Email Studio’s Gmail Scheduler can help.

Email Studio is a Gmail add-on that will not only help you schedule email messages inside Gmail but you can also send recurring emails. For instance, if you would like to send an email reminder to your tenant on the last Friday of every month, you can do it with the Gmail scheduler in a few easy steps.

Unlike email scheduler extensions like Boomerang or Sidekick that are browser specific, Email Studio is available right inside the Gmail website and thus works across all desktop browsers. You can even schedule email messages inside the Gmail app for Android without installing any app.

You can schedule email messages with Email Studio’s Gmail Scheduler in few easy steps. The basic idea is that you first compose all the emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail, let these unsent messages stay inside the drafts folder and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in Email Studio.

How to Setup Gmail Scheduler

Open the Gmail website, compose an email, add the message body and specify the recipients in the To, Cc or Bcc fields. After you are done writing an email, do not hit the send button but let these messages stay as drafts instead.

Go to the Gmail add-on store and click the blue “Install” button to add Email Studio to your own Gmail account.

After the Email Studio add-on is installed, go to your Gmail mailbox and open any message in the inbox. Please note that you need to open a message inside the Inbox folder and not the drafts folder as Gmail add-ons aren’t currently visible inside drafts.

You’ll now see the Email Studio icon in the right sidebar. Click the icon to open the addon and grant the necessary authorization. This is necessary since all the emails will go out from your own Gmail account.

You’ll see a list of services available inside the Email Studio sidebar. Click the Email Scheduler service and then choose Add New Schedule to schedule the draft message that you have composed in the previous step.

The email scheduler window presents a list of all your Gmail draft message in the drop-down. Select any message and then specify the preferred date and time when that message should be delivered.

The emails are scheduled in the timezone of your browser but you can also change the timezone per email message. Internally, the email scheduler sets up a cron job with Google Scripts and the emails will be sent within +/- 15 minutes of the specified time.

Chinese selfie app and smartphone maker Meitu has announced that Xiaomi is effectively taking over its hardware business. Future phones will carry the Meitu brand, but Xiaomi will be responsible for design, R&D, and sales, while Meitu will still be involved in camera software. Xiaomi’s Mi Home stores across the world will start carrying a bunch of wild selfie-focused cameraphones in the near future.

Amazon Prime members will be able to watch Aquaman in cinemas up to six days before its official release in the US. Each subscriber will be able to purchase up to 10 tickets for a 7pm showing on December 15th, just under a week before the film officially opens on December 21st.With early screenings of 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Hotel Transylvania 3, Amazon has also shown to release its original movies in cinemas before bringing them to its streaming serviceThe early screening of Aquaman can be watched early in around 1,000 participating cinemas across the US including branches owned by AMC, Regal, National Amusement Theaters and ArcLight Cinemas, and you can use Atom Tickets to book.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

PlayStation has today announced that battle royale phenomenon PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (better known as PUBG) will be landing on PS4 on December 7.With PUBG finally launching on Sony’s PS4, the company has finally decided to kill off its exclusivity on Microsoft Xbox, only a couple months after the 1.0 release of the game landed on the console. PlayStation 4 users will now be able to get the taste of real, life-like intense battles on PUBG’s 3 existing maps – Erangel, Miramar, and Sanhok.Speaking of the game’s development, Koo Sung Jeong, PS4’s Lead Project Manager in an official statement said, “It’s always exciting and tense presenting our work to the players as a developer. Getting our game into the hands of the PS4 community that haven’t experienced PUBG is a thrill equal to creating a new game.”

PUBG on PlayStation 4 will be available at the same $30 price tag as its Xbox and PC counterparts. Here are the details for the pre-order bundles, coming both in physical and digital form:

Samsung is ready to bring the Galaxy A9 to India and the four-camera phone will be unveiled for the Indian market on November 20.It is expected price of Rs 35,000 for the new phone, which sounds quite good given the feature set. The world’s first rear quad camera is packed with tons of signature Samsung software features and multitudes of shooting modes.

At that price it will take on the OnePlus 6T, Honor 10 and other phones in the affordable flagship category.

Quad Cameras

the Galaxy A9’s highlight is that four-camera array on the back, stacked vertically on the 3D glass curved back.

Among those four lenses is a 2x Optical Zoom 10MP telephoto f/2.4 lens, which lets you go in tight on the subject. Then there’s the Ultra Wide 120-degree 8MP Lens with f/2.4. The third sensor in the stack is the main camera which is a 24MP f/1.7 sensor. The fourth lens is the the 5MP Depth Lens with f/2.2, which allows the phone to deliver features such as portrait photos with adjustable bokeh, live focus photos and other cool tricks such a the Portrait Dolly.

On the front is a lonely single camera, an f/2.0 lens with a 24MP sensor. The Galaxy A9 gets the much-appreciated Scene Optimizer tech that we saw in the Note 9. This lets the camera identify the subject and adjust settings accordingly quickly.

Xiaomi has announced that it will launch the much-awaited successor to its ultra-popular Redmi Note 5 Pro – the Redmi Note 6 Pro in India on November 22.Redmi Note 6 Pro was first launched in Thailand back in September, in Indonesia earlier this month and is now finally coming to India to satisfy fans who have been waiting with bated breaths.

The Redmi Note 6 Pro builds upon the legacy of its predecessor but introduces a mix of some modern elements, such as smaller bezels, the notch, and an increased number of cameras.

This device features a huge 6.26-inch Full-HD+ IPS LCD panel with a 19:9 aspect ratio with a notch, of course! It boasts of an improved 86% screen-to-body ratio but we still have a massive bottom chin to deal with.

Much like its predecessor, it is powered by the same Snapdragon 636 SoC, coupled with up to 4GB of RAM and up to 64GB of onboard storage.

This device was the first Xiaomi smartphone to sport a quad-camera setup, but Mi Mix 3 has since followed suit. It includes a 12MP primary sensor, with an f/1.9 aperture, and a secondary 5MP depth sensor on the rear. There’s EIS and AI Scene Recognition on board here as well, something which was missing on the Redmi Note 5 Pro.

On the front, you will get a dual-camera setup, with a 20MP primary sensor and 2MP depth sensor. The device runs Xiaomi’s MIUI 10 skin on top of Android Oreo, includes a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, and a huge 4,000mAh battery.

Redmi note 6 price:

Redmi Note 6 Pro is priced at around Rs 14,199 for the base version. The 4GB+64GB variant retails for around Rs 15,999 (converted prices), so we can now expect the Indian prices to be in the same ballpark as last year’s Redmi Note 5 Pro.

Tencent Games, the developers of PUBG Mobile, has announced that the game has bagged the award for “Best Mobile Game of the Year” at the 2018 Golden Joystick Awards.

Vincent Wang, general manager, PUBG MOBILE global publishing team broke the news earlier today. He said, “The team is honored and thrilled that PUBG MOBILE has been recognized by 2018 Golden Joystick Awards. The response to the game from fans has energized everyone at the team as we are heads down working on new, exciting updates and contents for PUBG MOBILE.”

The feature will bring to Google Search certain features commonly found on social media platforms. Users will not only be able to read comments left by others, they will also be able to “like” or “dislike” their comments on Google search results. You can check out the comments you have left on results and your reviews on this dedicated page for users.

Google’s official help page states, “You can leave comments on things you’ve searched for on Google.” Google intends to roll out the commenting feature to additional content as well such as live sports matches or other events. You can check the full scope of comments, voting for comments on this help page.

Apex.AI is emerging out of stealth today with quite the claim — an operating system for autonomous vehicles that will never fail. Founded by long-time automated systems engineers Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic,Apex.AI develops operating systems for various types of autonomous mobility platforms.

Today, Apex.AI is also announcing a $15.5 million Series A round led by Canaan with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, which invested in Apex.AI’s seed round.

Apex.AI’s software stack is designed to easily integrate into existing systems and serve as the enterprise version of the Robot Operating System, an open-source software middleware for robotics.

California-based robotic process automation company (RPA) Automation Anywhere announced that it has raised $300 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund.

According to the company, this funding is an expansion of its July Series A round where it raised $250 million from other investors, that raised its valuation to $1.8 billion.

Automation Anywhere said, “The additional funding will be used to accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises and the workforce."

The SoftBank Vision Fund, with a corpus of $100 billion, has become one of the key investors for startup companies. In India, it has invested in several companies including Oyo, Ola, Paytm and Grofers.

Automation Anywhere is founded by four Indians Ankur Kothari, Mihir Shukla, Neeti Mehta, and Rushabh Parmani. It is a technology platform, which enables the automation of business processes.

Flipkart-owned online fashion portal Jabong is planning to keep only 25 per cent of employees out of its current strength, which is reportedly around 600 as a part of the integration process with Myntra.

It could fire an additional 200 of its employees in the next three months, said ET report quoting sources close to the development. Gurugram-based firm’s employees are also reported to move to Bengaluru.

Last Friday, Myntra’s chief executive Ananth Narayanan had announced that about 250 employees would lose their jobs as Myntra and Jabong are combining functions from finance, technology, marketing and creative teams among others departments. Narayanan had also dismissed the reports that he was leaving Myntra following Binny Bansal resignation.

According to Myntra spokesperson, both the fashion portals will fully integrate its all functioning and try to work more innovatively to remain a leader in the fashion segment.

It may be overshadowed by China and India, but tech has real growth potential in Southeast Asia. Home to a cumulative 650 million people, the region’s digital economy is forecast to triple in size and reach $240 billion over the next seven years, according to Google’s third “e-Conomy SEA” report.

The annual study, which is authored by Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and is arguably the most comprehensive research program for tech in Southeast Asia, has raised its estimation for the size of the digital economy in 2025 from an initial $200 billion after seeing the region reach “an inflection point.”

Online travel accounts for the majority of that revenue ($30 billion) ahead of e-commerce ($23 billion), online media ($11 billion) and ride-hailing ($8 billion), and that rough breakdown is likely to be maintained up until 2025, according to the report.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population, is forecast to hit $100 billion by 2025, head of Thailand ($43 billion) and Vietnam ($33 billion) with strong growth forecast across the board. Indonesia and Vietnam, in particular, have seen their respective digital economies more than triple since 2015, according to the data.

Kucoin is on a mission to make cryptocurrency trading “accessible to the masses by offering a user-friendly platform.”

KuCoin has increased its staff so it can offer 24/7 customer support in English and Chinese via social messaging app Telegram. It now also supports 12 different languages, as Gan revealed that language is a major barrier for many traders.

The deal was close last week, and that has proven true, with BlackBerry paying the full amount in cash up front. The acquisition is BlackBerry’s largest ever and it is set to close before February 2019 — the end of BlackBerry’s current financial year — and it will see Cylance operate as a separate business unit within BlackBerry’s business. The company plans to integrate Cylance technology with its Spark platform in the future.